An Post employs up to 8,000 workers and is a crucial service reaching every corner of this State. Not only is it crucial for business, it also involves the delivery of millions of items of personal mail, as will be demonstrated in the forthcoming Christmas season. In addition, by common consent, An Post has other crucial dimensions involving both the postal service and a social service in many regional towns, villages and remote parts of the country. The importance of this service is underlined by the fact that when these services are threatened, public representatives, including many Government Deputies, raise a ferocious clamour. Happily, in the past, they have had some success in preserving these services. The problem is, however, that the Government will not fund this crucial service.

In 2002, the Flynn report spoke of considerable financial pressures if the proper level of investment was not forthcoming for the postal service, yet An Post was awarded a paltry €12 million to facilitate some post offices transferring services to an agency basis. One of the worst aspects is that An Post's staff and pensioners are now being called upon to subsidise the service in which the Government will not invest. They have not received increases under Sustaining Progress, including workers earning less than €18,000 per annum and SDS workers who face 274 job losses following a unilateral decision.

It has been revealed in the House today that the Government allows millionaires get away without paying a penny of tax. Since 2001, the Government has robbed the elderly in their nursing home beds, yet now the Taoiseach wants to leave low-paid workers in An Post to pay for the crucial services it provides. All in all, the Taoiseach looks like a neo-liberal embodiment of that harsh warlord in the Christian gospel whose motto was, "To those who have, more will be given and from those who have little, even that will be taken away". I am not posing an industrial relations question to the Taoiseach. I am asking him about his overall investment policy for An Post.

Hear, hear.

A few years ago, the Flynn report listed several recommendations that are being implemented. If I recall correctly, they were also paid for in terms of staff remuneration and allowances so that the report's recommendations could be undertaken. Over the years, we have taken significant steps to modernise the postal service, including updating its technological automation.

Over the past 18 months, talks have continued between An Post management and trade unions to agree on the full implementation of the Flynn report. I acknowledge that An Post's staff did not receive the payments that were given to everybody else. They did not receive the benchmarking awards as the talks went on because of the company's financial position.

The changes concerning post offices, which involved moving uneconomic entities onto an agency basis, have continued. These discussions are continuing. We all want to see the postal network being maintained but it must be done on an efficient and modern basis. That was the subject of the Flynn report's recommendations, whose implementation is a matter for the management and workers to resolve by agreement.

Is An Post and its workers now to be treated in the same way as Aer Lingus which is another publicly-owned company that was milked for advantage when it suited the State and successive Governments and then starved of investment at the same time, with workers obliged to carry the burden through sackings and a deteriorating service and the tax-paying public to suffer the effects of cutbacks? What are the principles under which the Government approaches the postal service? Does the Taoiseach agree there is an important social element in An Post's service and that, therefore, it is not simply a question of the profitability of every single unit or area? If he accepts that, how does he propose to fund it and invest in the service? Does the Taoiseach therefore agree with me that it is scandalous that the workers and pensioners have had to carry the can up to now rather than the Government making necessary fiscal decisions to invest in this crucial service?

The answer to the first question is "Yes". If it was not so and that the Government did not see it as a good social service, we would not have continued over the years against considerable competition and opposition, including challenges in Europe over giving An Post large amounts of the social welfare business and any other business we could find, to keep the social element of it and to try to get some kind of economic viability into the service.

I believe the Deputy will acknowledge, as I do, that it is not the fault of An Post workers but that technology has changed the situation for them. They have been losing in excess of 6% on letter post alone based on the last figures I remember when talking to social partners some time ago about the matter. They have also been losing quite substantial parts of their core business in other ways because of texting, e-mailing and other technology. That has undermined to a great degree the viability of the postal service. However, in spite of that in recent years we have invested approximately €100 million in technology infrastructure. Admittedly a large part of that went on the sale of PostGem, its dotcom company, which was re-invested to provide the services. An Post is trading in a difficult position and the Government, board and trade unions need to help it through what is a fundamental change in how people do business in the modern world.